Extensible Markup Language (XML) has become a standard data exchange format in electronic business. Although XML can support syntactic interoperability, problems arise when data sources represented as XML documents need to be integrated. On reason is that XML lacks support for efficient sharing of conceptualization. The Web Ontology Language (OWL) can play an important role as it can enable semantic interoperability and it supports the representation of domain knowledge using classes, properties, and instances.
In some situations, there is a need to convert XML documents to OWL ontologies. This area of research has received some attention, and there are a few existing tools. However, the existing tools have a number of shortcomings. For example, the existing tools do not address the handling of characteristics such as internal references, imports, includes, etc. These aspects are commonly used in XML schemas.
Therefore, there exists ample opportunity for improvement in technologies related to generating OWL ontologies from XML.